Rough Cuts

F.L.: Fritz Lang: His Life and Work, Photographs and Documents, Edited by Rolf Aurich,

Wolfgang Jacobsen and Cornelius Schnauber, Jovis: 512 pp., $50

DAVID LEAN: An Intimate Portrait, By Sandy Lean with Barry Chattington, Universe: 244 pp., $45

THE HITCHCOCK MURDERS, By Peter Conrad, Faber & Faber: 362 pp., $25

Aside from a few malcontents over at the Writers Guild, we are all auteurists now. The reason is self-evident: Directors are responsible for the movieness of movies. That is to say, they are in charge of all the things that are unique to film as an expressive form. As the senior officer present on any picture, the director gets most of the credit or blame for its success or failure. More important, he satisfies the apparently ineluctable human need to attribute personal authorship to any work of (presumptive) art.

This was not always clearly so. In the first decades of sound production, when the studios were organized on the factory model, it was harder to discern how this authority asserted itself in American films. It required the cunning of a Howard Hawks or an Alfred Hitchcock to subvert the house manner each studio imposed on its directors. In those days, too, writers consistently wrote memorable dialogue, their language competing with visual imagery for space in our memories. But then, as now, studio executives were careless with writers: With so many hands contributing to a script, how could any one writer stake a claim to authorship?

Directing, though, remains a mystery for studio people, who tend to fall back in awe at those who have mastered the techniques (and the egos) required to create a movie. It’s easy to fire writers, toiling in anonymity, before much money has been spent on a film; canning a director once a picture is rolling is a consequential and, indeed, newsworthy act.

Something of the shamanistic clings to directors in the literature of film. Full-scale biographies are, on the whole, unsatisfactory. They run to the hagiographic (two recent ones on John Ford are an example) or to the sourly gossiping (Frank Capra, Hawks, Hitchcock). The lives stubbornly refuse to illuminate the work. Surrounding these tombstones, however, there is a vast sub-literature: critical studies, collections of interviews and papers, memoirs. The cinephile community is not a writerly one, but it is beaverish in the way it collects raw material and places the data before the reader, leaving the door open for a larger treatment, or not.

Take, for instance, “F.L.,” a vast multilingual accompaniment to last year’s international retrospective of Fritz Lang’s work, which regrettably does not include anything resembling a mature critical consideration of Lang’s remarkable oeuvre. Andrew Sarris’ brilliant three-paragraph summary in “The American Cinema” would scarcely have burdened a 512-page book.

That said, however, it is amusing to read--as one can in these pages--early German critics as they struggled to find a language appropriate to Lang’s first films, high cultural pomp attuned more to the loopy intellectual and spiritual pretensions of “Metropolis” or “Dr. Mabuse” or “Spione” than to the redeeming energy and conviction of their spectacle. There is, as well, poignancy in the documents reflecting Lang’s efforts to aid and comfort, in his stiff, monocled way, his fellow exiles from Nazism. That he did so while developing, in an alien landscape, his great gift for American genre filmmaking (“Scarlet Street,” “The Big Heat,” “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt” ) is something this book does not notice. It’s up to knowledgeable readers to impute it.

They will have less fun with Sandy Lean’s “intimate portrait” of her husband, David Lean. He once said that if he ever wrote his autobiography, it would be “a book with a lot of pictures,” and this volume handsomely fulfills that imperative. The widow Lean (she was his sixth wife) also fulfills the implicit demands of loving memory, which puts the best possible face on his egocentricity. Because she entered the director’s life late, her stress is on the pictorially brilliant epics (such as “Lawrence of Arabia”) that consumed her husband’s last decades.

These are visually imposing films, much beloved by Lean’s fellow directors. But they have severe problems, notably a dwindling of narrative power in their second halves, which Sandy Lean doesn’t notice. Her treatment of Lean’s early work is similarly vague, though these films are, I think, much more satisfying. Finally, she treats as more or less harmless eccentricities his defects of personality: his silences, his inability to make emotional connections, his abrupt withdrawals of friendship over largely imaginary slights, his depressed wanderings in search of the places where he took the pretty, detached still photos with which this book is replete--defects of nature that finally became the defects of his films, with the obsessive formalism of his compositions draining them of wayward life.

Hitchcock wore his obsessions more amusingly, though you wouldn’t know that from Peter Conrad’s “The Hitchcock Murders.” The author sneaked out of school to see “Psycho” in 1961 and hasn’t been the same since. His apartment, he says, contains 100 Hitchcock movie posters, and his mind is equally cluttered with a great career’s detritus. His strategy is to isolate Hitchcock’s preoccupations--cool blonds, staircases, keys, voyeurism, physical restraint, religious iconography, to name but a few--and trace them from film to film across his 54-year career. This yields some fascinating congruities, but somehow both the man and his works elude Conrad.

Hitchcock remained in touch throughout his life with his nervous, slightly nerdy inner child, and it was the source of his many compulsions. But he was also a fairly self-conscious modernist--form almost always trumped “thriller” content in his movies--whose mastery of his medium grew ever more sophisticated over the years. It’s amusing, even instructive, to see him return to tropes first explored in his early silents many decades later. But even devoted Hitchcockians (of which I am one) need a chronology to keep the story straight, an acknowledgment of recurrent themes larger than his obsessive tics, a sense of how his technique kept growing in subtlety and some feeling that the writer is not just looking but judging the quality of individual works. When, however, you set an obsessive--even one as observant as Conrad--to catch an obsessive, you end up with Psycho babble.

Michel Ciment’s well-illustrated study of Stanley Kubrick is the third edition of the work (hence that “Definitive” in the subtitle), and he has a far more difficult task than Conrad’s. Kubrick made only 13 films (as opposed to Hitchcock’s 51), but he never repeated himself. His consistencies were all intellectual. What emerges from Ciment’s work is a portrait of a glum but cinematically brilliant existentialist. His was a lifelong critique of pure reason, which was, as he saw it, all we have but never enough. The institutions charged with defending rationalism were avatars of irrationalism, a matter Kubrick’s war movies (“Paths of Glory,” “Dr. Strangelove,” “Full Metal Jacket”) make cruelly clear. Sex, with or without romance, is a snare and a delusion (“Lolita” in his screen version or “Eyes Wide Shut”); overt rebellion is doomed (“A Clockwork Orange”) and so is the attempt to get along by going along (“Barry Lyndon”). And, anyway, mortality--the thing Kubrick rebelled most profoundly against--will soon enough render all efforts to transcend our lot meaningless. The only bleak hope Kubrick offered us was rebirth (“2001: A Space Odyssey”), and that’s always been a pretty dim prospect.

Ciment is perhaps a little too reliant on high-toned European literary and philosophical thinkers to support his arguments. But I like the sobriety of this book, the way it forces us to get outside the cine-chat box and look freshly at a serious artist, among whose achievements we must number his ability to go his own way, making expensive and singular movies within the mainstream. Maybe Kubrick’s rebel protagonists were foredoomed, but he managed his own lonely life with an elan that actually deserves our awe.

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Richard Schickel is the author of “Matinee Idylls” and reviews movies for Time magazine.